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color of old bone, its bowl filled with a nasty-looking brown mixture, and when Hanukkah parted his cracked lips, the Frank struck a flint to the bowl of the pipe and encouraged Hanukkah to draw the thick, honeyed smoke into his lungs. Hanukkah coughed, and then drew again, and it was not long before he was aware of being filled, in rippling drizzles, by a stream of amber honey poured through his mouth and neck into the bottle of his soul. The scarecrow took hold of his arm again and slipped it from his belly like the loosened string of a robe.
    When Hanukkah came to himself he was seated, slumped, on the back of his own horse, with a burning sensation in his midsection and his arms around the waist of the man who had saved his life and who was now engaged in an argument, in an unknown language, with the African on his spotted Parthian. The sun had dipped behind the slope of the mountain along whose eastern skirt ran the road that led, hugging the southeast littoral of the Khazar Sea, from Azerbaijan to Atil. The air was crisp, the light wistful and the smell of the Frankish physician abominable, and Hanukkah knew that he was going to live.
    “Thank you,” he said, or tried to say, but his throat was raw and his lips half-sealed, and it did not emerge loud enough to interrupt the dispute between the African and the Frank. He said, in Arabic, “Thank you for finding my horse.”
    The African left off making whatever irritated point he had been trying to score against the Frank, turned his great head toward Hanukkah and said: “Have you any objection to this fellow’s taking it as payment for saving your life? Provided that we agree to convey you to water, food and a road home before we part ways?”
    It was a reasonable and acceptable proposal, but there was a querulous note in the African’s voice that made Hanukkah leery of agreeing too quickly.
    “I am not sure my life is so valuable,” he said. “But if the terms are agreeable to the learned gentleman.…”
    “I don’t want your old hack,” the Frank said, and the bones of his back stood out against the dusty black leather of his jerkin. “I want Hillel. And do not repeat, Amram, that a horse is a horse, because history, circumstances and I have disproved that argument many times.”
    “The manhunters are two days ahead of us,” the African said. “They’re heavily armed and bound for a kingdom in which we have no business, no friends. Apart from your freakish half-Arabian sweetheart, for whom you have now, thanks to the openhandedness of this good Khazar, found adequate replacement, I see nothing that we stand to gain from the pursuit of that boy.”
    “Our money,” the Frank said. “He has that too.”
    “I’m afraid not,” Hanukkah said. “It was divided among the bastards who put me and the others to the sword, with the promise of more on the boy’s safe return to Atil, and greater reward still on the restoration of his family to the bek’s tripod. He has an older brother named Alp, who was sold by the usurper into slavery among the Rus and whose cause the stripling advanced, along with the contents of his, or rather of your, sack of gold.”
    “The king of the great land of the Khazars rules with his ass slung in a tripod?”
    “The bek is not our king,” Hanukkah said, trying to explain how alone among the civilized peoples of the earth the Khazars, in their wisdom, had discovered a means by which men might, profitably and without excessive peril to their souls, serve two masters. There was the bek, who directed the daily course of men’s affairs, in the teeming streets of Atil, in the profane worlds of warfare and commerce, and over him—over all the Khazar people, embodying them and their interests and speaking on their behalf to God and all his angels—there was the kagan, in his palace on his sacred island in the middle of the river Atil, whose word was law and whose face was never seen.
    “A kagan is the father, the mother and